Cubism Movement, Artists and Major Works | The Art Story Resources Quotes "Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from." Pablo Picasso "The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought.. Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless." Pablo Picasso "What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space." Georges Braque "If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas...

One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be." Georges Braque "Cubism is moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time." Juan Gris "It was a tradition to represent a dancer frozen in a chosen position, like a snapshot.

I broke away from this tradition by superimposing postures, blending light and motion and scrambling the planes." Sonia Delaunay "Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power." Fernand Léger "Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'etre." Jean Metzinger "Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal." Jean Metzinger "Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change.

It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'" David Hockney "He commenced the long struggle not to express what he could see but not to express the things he did not see, that is to say the things everybody is certain of seeing but which they do not really see." Gertrude Stein, on Picasso's early art "I have transformed myself in the zero of form and fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of Academic Art. I have destroyed the circle of the horizon and escaped from the circle of objects, the horizon-ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms from nature. The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is the living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art." Kazimir Malevich Like The Art Story on Facebook Beginnings A watershed moment for the development of Cubism was the posthumous retrospective of Paul Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. Cézanne's use of generic forms to simplify nature was incredibly influential to both Picasso and Braque.

In the previous year, Picasso was also introduced to non-Western art: seeing Iberian art in Spain, and African-influenced art by Matisse, and at the Trocadero anthropological museum. What drew Picasso to these artistic traditions was their use of an abstract or simplified representation of the human body rather than the naturalistic forms of the European Renaissance tradition. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Breakthrough: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon These varying influences can be seen in Picasso's groundbreaking work of 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is considered a work of proto or pre-Cubism. In its radical distortion of figures, its rendering of volumes as fragmented planes, and its subdued palette, this work predicted some of the key characteristics of later Cubism. Braque, on seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles at his studio, intensified his similar explorations in simplification of form.

He made a series of landscape paintings in the summer of 1908, including Houses at L'Estaque in which trees and mountains were rendered as shaded cubes and pyramids, resembling architectural forms. Cubism was introduced to the public with Braque's one-man exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery on the rue Vignon in November 1908. It was this exhibit that led French art critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe them as "bizarreries cubiques," thus giving the movement its name. The experiments of Picasso and Braque owe much to Kahnweiler, who was the major supporter of their work. Picasso and Braque were both quite poor in 1907 and Kahnweiler offered to buy their works as they painted them, thus freeing the artists from worrying about pleasing patrons or receiving negative reviews. After the 1908 exhibit, with few exceptions, the two artists exhibited only in Kahnweiler's gallery. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque The close collaboration between Picasso and Braque beginning in 1909 was crucial to the style's genesis.

The two artists met regularly to discuss their progress, and at times it became hard to distinguish the work of one artist from another (as they liked it). Both were living in the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris in the years before and during World War I, making their collaboration easy. In 1912, Kahnweiler gave his first public interview on Cubism, no doubt in response to growing public interest in (and some recognition of) the movement. When World War I began, Kahnweiler, as a German, was exiled from France. During the war, Léonce Rosenberg became the main dealer for Cubist art in Paris (including those of the Salon Cubists) with his brother Paul Rosenberg serving as Picasso's dealer during the interwar years. Though Picasso and Braque returned to Cubist forms periodically throughout their careers and there were some exhibitions of work up until 1925, the two-man movement did not last much beyond World War I. Salon or Section d'Or Cubism The Salon Cubists, so-called because they showed their works at public exhibits such as the Salon d'Automne, did not work closely with Picasso and Braque but were influenced by their experiments.

It was through the work of the Salon Cubists that the movement became widely known to the public in the early 1910s. These artists included Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger. Metzinger and Delaunay, who had been friends at least since 1906, began collaborating with Gleizes as a result of the yearly Salon d'Automne. It was through Gleizes that they met Le Fauconnier who had published Note sur la peinture (1910) in which he praised Picasso and Braque for their "total emancipation" of painting. These artists exhibited together at the 1911 Salon des Independants, introducing Cubism to the general public. The Independants was a non-juried exhibition where public reaction depended on how and where paintings were hung. The Cubists got control of the hanging committee from the Neo-Impressionists so that their works could be hung together in one room as a coherent school.

The paintings created a stir, as Gleizes noted: "While the newspapers sounded the alarm to alert people to the danger, and while appeals were made to the public authorities to do something about it, song writers, satirists and other men of wit and spirit provoked great pleasure among the leisured classes by playing with the word 'cube', discovering that it was a very suitable vehicle for inducing laughter which, as we all know, is the principle characteristic that distinguishes man from the animals." In addition to showing their works in large exhibitions, the Salon Cubists were also distinct from Picasso and Braque in that they often worked on a large scale, leading one art historian to coin the term 'Epic Cubism' to distinguish their work from the more intimate paintings of Picasso and Braque. While they broke apart objects and bodies into geometric forms like those of Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists did not challenge Renaissance conceptions of space to the same extent nor did they embrace the monochromatic color of Analytic Cubism or the collage elements of Synthetic Cubism.

At the end of 1911 Gleizes and Metzinger, who lived closely together in the Parisian suburbs, and others in the group began meeting in Puteaux, a suburb where the painter and engraver Jacques Villon and his brother, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon had their studios (leading to them sometimes being called the Puteaux group). It is likely as a result of these meetings that the main ideas for Metzinger and Gleizes' On Cubism (1912) were formalized; it was the first published statement about the style. The next year the group also planned the launch of the Salon de la Section d'Or (1912) that would bring together the most radical currents in painting. The term Section d'Or was a name the Salon Cubists adopted to show their attachment to the golden mean, i.e. the belief in order and the importance of mathematical proportions in their works that reflected those in nature. The Section d'Or exhibit was held after the 1912 Salon d'Automne at the Galerie La Boetie.

It was at this exhibit that the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism to refer to the work of Delaunay. The next year Apollinaire published Aesthetic Meditations: The Cubist Painters (1913). These many exhibits and publications were calculated to make an impact, both in Paris and abroad. As with the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the Salon or Section d'Or group did not continue coherently after WWI, having only sporadic exhibits between 1918 and 1925. Styles The various stages of development in the Cubist style are based on the work of Picasso and Braque rather than on those of the Salon Cubists. The exact names and dates of the stages are debated and continually reframed to this day.

Cezannian Cubism (1908 -1909) This early phase of the movement came in the wake of the Paul Cézanne retrospective in 1907 when many artists were reintroduced or introduced for the first time to the work of Cézanne, who had been living in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France before his death and had not exhibited in Paris for many years. Several artists who saw the retrospective were influenced by his lack of three-dimensionality, the material quality of his brushwork, and his use of uniform brushstrokes. Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908) is a good example of this type of Cubism. Analytic Cubism (1910- 1912) In this phase, Cubism developed in a highly systematic fashion. Later to be known as the Analytic period of the style, it was based on close observation of objects in their background contexts, often showing them from various vantage points.

Picasso and Braque restricted their subject matter to the traditional genres of portraiture and still life and also limited their palette to earth tones and muted grays in order to lessen the clarity between the fragmented shapes of figures and objects. Although their works were often similar in appearance, their separate interests showed through over time. Braque tended to show objects exploding out or pulled apart into fragments, while Picasso rendered them magnetized, with attracting forces compelling elements of the pictorial space into the center of the composition. Works in this style include Braque's Violin and Palette (1909) and Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-12). Towards the end of this stage of Cubism, Juan Gris began to make contributions to the style: he maintained a sharp clarity to his forms, provided suggestions of a compositional grid, and introduced more color to what had been an austere, monochromatic style. Synthetic Cubism (c. 1912 - c. 1914) In 1912 both Picasso and Braque began to introduce foreign elements into their compositions, continuing their experiments with multiple perspectives.

Picasso incorporated wall paper that imitated chair caning into Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912), thus initiating Cubist collage, and Braque began to glue newspaper to his canvases, beginning the movement's exploration of papier-colle. In part this may have resulted from the artists' growing discomfort with the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, though it could also be argued that these Synthetic experiments touched off an even more radical turn away from Renaissance depictions of space, and towards a more conceptual rendering of objects and figures. Picasso's experiments with sculpture are also included as part of the Synthetic Cubist style as they employ collaged elements. Crystal Cubism (1915 -1922) As a response to the chaos of war, there was a tendency among many French artists to pull back from radical experimentation; this inclination was not unique to Cubism. One art historian has described this stage of Cubism as the "end product of a progressive closing down of possibilities." In Léger's Three Women (1921), for example, the depicted subjects are hard-edged rather than resembling overlapping bits of low-relief sculpture; Léger also did not attempt to show objects from various angles.

Crystal Cubism is associated with Salon Cubism as well as with the works of Picasso and Braque. Crystal Cubism is part of the larger trend known as a "Return to Order" that was associated with artists in the School of Paris. Further Developments Cubism spread quickly throughout Europe in the 1910s, as much because of its systematic approach to rendering imagery as for the openness it offered in depicting objects in new ways. Critics were split over whether Cubists were concerned with representing imagery in a more objective manner - revealing more of its essential character - or whether they were principally interested in distortion and abstraction. The movement lies at the root of a host of early twentieth styles including Constructivism, Futurism, Suprematism, Orphism, and De Stijl. Many important artists went through a Cubist phase in their development, perhaps the most notable of whom was Marcel Duchamp whose notorious Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) garnered much attention and many negative reviews at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. The ideas in the movement also fed into more popular phenomena, like Art Deco design and architecture.

Later movements such as Minimalism were also influenced by the Cubist use of the grid, and it is difficult to imagine the development of non-representational art without the experiments of the Cubists. Like other paradigm changing artistic movements of twentieth-century art, like Dada and Pop, Cubism shook the foundations of traditional artmaking by turning the Renaissance tradition on its head and changing the course of art history with reverberations that continue into the postmodern era. Cubism Cubism Key Dates: 1908-1914 The Cubist art movement began in Paris around 1907. Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several different points of view simultaneously. The movement was conceived as ‘a new way of representing the world’, and assimilated outside influences, such as African art, as well as new theories on the nature of reality, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Cubism is often divided into two phases – the Analytic phase (1907-12), and the Synthetic phase (1913 through the 1920s). The initial phase attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them. The Synthetic phase featured works that were composed of fewer and simpler forms, in brighter colours. Other major exponents of Cubism included Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger. Representative Artists: Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 | Kimbell Art Museum Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 May 29, 2011 to August 21, 2011 Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912 united select paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during these two exhilarating years of their artistic dialogue.

“This small-scale exhibition examines a brief moment with huge implications for the history of art,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “This show is the first to focus exclusively on this landmark period of intense productivity and adventure for Picasso and Braque.” This international loan exhibition was organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum and had its debut in Fort Worth. During the years 1910 through 1912, these two great masters invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a recognizable description of the real world—and toyed with them irreverently. “These are beautiful, enigmatic, playful works of art. They’re like conversations in the artist’s studio or favorite café, not to be hurried,” remarked Malcolm Warner, deputy director at the Kimbell Art Museum. “We hope our visitors will take the time to savor them.” Following up on hints they found in the work of Paul Cézanne, and brimming with youthful bravado, Picasso and Braque created pictorial puzzles, comprehensible to a point but full of false leads and contradictions.

Viewers pick up a few clues—a figure, a pipe, a mustache, a bottle, a glass, a musical instrument, a newspaper, a playing card—and these start to suggest a reality in three dimensions. The impression is that of a fast, modern world, with glimpses of models, friends, and the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking. But things never fully add up, either in detail or as a whole—and deliberately so. Teasingly elusive, the image is a construction of forms and signs that the artist has put together in a spirit of parody and play. The pleasure for the viewer is to let go of all normal expectations and enter into the game, which is an endlessly intriguing one. More than any avant-garde artists before them, Picasso and Braque called into question conventional ideas about art as the imitation of reality. They collaborated so closely and like-mindedly (“roped together like mountain climbers,” in Braque’s own phrase) that their works of this period are sometimes difficult to tell apart. Their radical experiment in picture-making, which came to be known as Analytic Cubism, has been as far-reaching in its implications for art as the theories of Einstein for science.

This choice, intimately scaled exhibition, featuring 16 paintings and 20 etchings and drypoints, was conceived and organized by Eik Kahng, chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, in partnership with the Kimbell and Mr. Warner. The Kimbell was a natural collaborator on the project since the Museum’s collection includes an outstanding example of the work of each artist from the Analytic Cubist period, Picasso’s Man with a Pipe and Braque’s Girl with a Cross, both painted in 1911. In the exhibition these appeared among paintings from a number of other distinguished collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tate in London, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and the Robert B. and Mercedes H. Eichholz Collection. The etchings and drypoints were selected from several sources, most notably the extraordinary holdings of Cubist prints in the Melamed Family Collection.

Not surprisingly in light of its importance in the history of art, Cubism has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions. Some of them have been dauntingly large, especially given the amount of time each of these highly complicated works demands of the viewer. The guiding principle of this exhibition was that less can be more. It offered the kind of small, carefully calibrated selection that invites the viewer to spend time exploring each work in detail. The inclusion of a good number of etchings and drypoints ensured that printmaking emerged with a proper sense of its importance to Picasso and Braque at this moment in their careers. Other themes suggested by the exhibition and discussed in the accompanying catalogue include the role of format, especially the use of oval-shaped canvases. What part does this play in the Cubists’ pictorial game? How do the visual push and pull of the oval format differ from those of the rectangle or square? How did the artists intend their oval compositions to be framed? This last question is especially relevant to the Kimbell’s Picasso, an oval canvas that has been lined and framed as a rectangle.

In an essay in the catalogue, Kimbell conservators Claire Barry and Bart Devolder present the discovery that this painting appears in an early photograph of the artist’s studio—as a work in progress, much different from its final form, but clearly on an oval stretcher. This, along with results of their research into the materials and techniques of the Cubists, was also presented in a special section of the exhibition. For over a year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art worked with California-based MegaVision to capture spectral images of select works in the exhibition. The quality of spectral imaging surpasses that of normal professional photography. Thanks to recent advances in the technology of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), RGB (red, green, and blue) filters have been removed from behind the lens and replaced with LED-produced RGB light, which is aimed directly onto the object that is being photographed. Beyond the visible spectrum, spectral imaging allows options for ultraviolet and infrared, which can reveal features invisible to the human eye. The elimination of the filters in the optical path allows for a higher-quality image, greater accuracy of color, and, especially important in the art world, a huge reduction of harmful light.

The spectral imaging created by MegaVision was incorporated into interactive software that allowed visitors and online users to manipulate and study works with a level of detail and precision never before possible for museum audiences. Produced in partnership with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, this cutting-edge visual technology introduced new ways to look at and understand the processes, relationships, and stylistic developments of this important movement. Hand-held, touch-screen computers provided mobility and interactive media content to exhibition visitors. For the first time in a museum setting, every visitor had the opportunity to sit in front of an actual painting by Picasso or Braque and independently zoom in on the smallest brush strokes and specks of color. This is just an example of the many explorations that this program made available to visitors. Join Today 1000+ images about Movement | Cubism | 1910's-1920's on Pinterest | Georges braque, Pablo picasso and Portrait Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Movement | Cubism | 1910's-1920's Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture.

Variants such as Futurism and Constructivism developed in other countries. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. 88 Pins94 Followers 1000+ images about painting XXVI / cubism on Pinterest | Georges braque, Pablo picasso and Portrait Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas painting XXVI / cubism 1908-1914 The Cubist art movement began in Paris around 1907. Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. 282 Pins2.77k Followers MoMA | Cubism Cubism Explore how Cubist artists shattered conventions of representation and perspective.

Tools & Tips: Cubism Following their 1907 meeting in Paris, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist style , a new vision for a new century that inspired paintings that were initially ridiculed by critics for consisting of “little cubes.” Often painting side-by-side in their Montmartre, Paris, studios, the artists developed a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that rejected the conventions of perspective and representation . Cubist works challenged viewers to understand a subject broken down into its geometrical components and often represented from several angles at once. Traditional subjects like nude figures , landscapes , and still lifes were reinvented as increasingly fragmented compositions by Picasso, Braque, and other artists working in and around the French capital. Cubists abstracted from real life to make their work, but most often maintained small identifiable clues to a realistic figure, whether a woman or a violin. The artists adopted a neutral palette of browns and blacks, intending the viewer to focus on the geometric composition rather than the color . Cubism marks a pioneering moment in the history of art—one that ended when many of its leading practitioners, Braque among them, enlisted to fight in World War I.

To explore more, click on each artwork thumbnail, then click again on the larger image that appears in the box above. 1. The range of colors used by an artist in making a work of art; 2. A thin wooden or plastic board on which an artist holds and mixes paint. Cubism - the first abstract style of modern art Cubism Cubism - The First Style of Abstract Art PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) 'Factory, Horta de Ebbo', 1909 (oil on canvas) Cubism was a truly revolutionary style of modern art developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. It was the first style of abstract art which evolved at the beginning of the 20th century in response to a world that was changing with unprecedented speed. Cubism was an attempt by artists to revitalise the tired traditions of Western art which they believed had run their course. The Cubists challenged conventional forms of representation, such as perspective, which had been the rule since the Renaissance . Their aim was to develop a new way of seeing which reflected the modern age.

In the four decades from 1870-1910, western society witnessed more technological progress than in the previous four centuries. During this period, inventions such as photography, cinematography, sound recording, the telephone, the motor car and the airplane heralded the dawn of a new age. The problem for artists at this time was how to reflect the modernity of the era using the tired and trusted traditions that had served art for the last four centuries. Photography had begun to replace painting as the tool for documenting the age and for artists to sit illustrating cars, planes and images of the new technologies was not exactly rising to the challenge. Artists needed a more radical approach - a 'new way of seeing' that expanded the possibilities of art in the same way that technology was extending the boundaries of communication and travel. This new way of seeing was called Cubism - the first abstract style of modern art. Picasso and Braque developed their ideas on Cubism around 1907 in Paris and their starting point was a common interest in the later paintings of Paul Cézanne .

The Influence of Cézanne PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906) 'Bibemus Quarry', 1895 (oil on canvas) Cézanne was not primarily interested in creating an illusion of depth in his painting and he abandoned the tradition of perspective drawing. Perspective, which had been used since the Early Renaissance, was a geometric formula that solved the problem of how to draw three-dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface. Cézanne felt that the illusionism of perspective denied the fact that a painting is a flat two-dimensional object. He liked to flatten the space in his paintings to place more emphasis on their surface - to stress the difference between a painting and reality. He saw painting in more abstract terms as the construction and arrangement of colour on a two-dimensional surface. It was this flat abstract approach that appealed to the Cubists and their early paintings, such as Picasso's 'Factory at Horta de Ebbo' (1909) and Braque's 'Viaduct at L'Estaque' (1908,) took it to an extreme.

GEORGES BRAQUE (1882-1963) 'Viaduct at L'Estaque', 1908 (oil on canvas) The limitations of perspective were also seen as an obstacle to progress by the Cubists. The fact that a picture drawn in perspective could only work from one viewpoint restricted their options. As the image was drawn from a fixed position, the result was frozen, like a snapshot - but the Cubists wanted to make pictures that reached beyond the rigid geometry of perspective. They wanted to introduce the idea of 'relativity' - how the artist perceived and selected elements from the subject, fusing both their observations and memories into the one concentrated image. To do this the Cubists examined the way that we see. When you look at an object your eye scans it, stopping to register on a certain detail before moving on to the next point of interest and so on. You can also change your viewpoint in relation to the object allowing you to look at it from above, below or from the side.

Therefore, the Cubists proposed that your sight of an object is the sum of many different views and your memory of an object is not constructed from one angle, as in perspective, but from many angles selected by your sight and movement. Cubist painting, paradoxically abstract in form, was an attempt at a more realistic way of seeing. A typical Cubist painting depicts real people, places or objects, but not from a fixed viewpoint. Instead it will show you many parts of the subject at one time, viewed from different angles, and reconstructed into a composition of planes, forms and colours. The whole idea of space is reconfigured: the front, back and sides of the subject become interchangeable elements in the design of the work. JUAN GRIS (1887-1927) 'Violin and Glass', 1915 (oil on canvas) Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque conceived and developed Cubism but other artists also adopted the style. The Spanish artist Juan Gris , who is often referred to as the 'Third Musketeer of Cubism', was the best of these and he refined the Cubist vocabulary into his own instantly recognizable visual language.

Other notable artists associated with Cubism were Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Louis Marcoussis, Marie Laurencin and Roger de La Fresnaye. The Influence of African Art LEFT: Pablo Picasso, 'Head of a Woman', 1907 (oil on canvas) RIGHT: Dan Mask from West Africa The Cubists believed that the traditions of Western art had become exhausted and another remedy they applied to revitalize their work was to draw on the expressive energy of art from other cultures, especially African art . However, they were not interested in the true religious or social symbolism of these cultural objects, but valued them superficially for their expressive style. They viewed them as subversive elements that could be used to attack and subsequently refresh the tired tradition of Western art. This inspiration to cross-reference art from different cultures probably came from Paul Gauguin , the French post-impressionist artist, whose paintings and prints were influenced by the native culture of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands where he spent his final years.

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) 'Still Life with Chair Caning', 1912 (oil on canvas) Around 1912, the styles of Picasso and Braque were becoming predictable. Their images had grown so similar that their paintings of this period are often difficult to tell apart. Their work was increasingly abstract and less recognizable as the subject of their titles. Cubism was running out of creative steam. In an attempt to revitalise the style and pull it back from total abstraction, Picasso began to glue printed images from the 'real world' onto the surface of his still lifes. His painting 'Still Life with Chair Caning’ was the first example of this 'collage' technique and it opened the door for himself and other artists to the second phase of the Cubist style: Synthetic Cubism. PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) 'Still Life with mandolin and Guitar', 1924 (oil on canvas) Influenced by the introduction of bold and simple collage shapes, Synthetic Cubism moved away from the unified monochrome surfaces of Analytic Cubism to a more direct, colorful and decorative style.

Although synthetic cubist images appear more abstract in their use of simplified forms, the other elements of their composition are applied quite traditionally. Interchanging lines, colours, patterns and textures that switch from geometric to freehand, dark to light, positive to negative and plain to patterned, advance and recede in rhythms across the picture plain. 'Weeping Woman', 1937 (oil on canvas) Cubism was invented around 1907 in Paris by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubism was the first abstract style of modern art. A Cubist painting ignores the traditions of perspective drawing and shows you many views of a subject at one time. The Cubists introduced collage into painting. The Cubists were influenced by art from other cultures, particularly African masks. There are two distinct phases of the Cubist Style: Analytical Cubism (pre 1912) and Synthetic Cubism (post 1912) Cubism influenced many other styles of modern art including Orphism, Futurism, Vorticism, Suprematism, Constructivism and Expressionism .

Cubism | Student Simple Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, considered to be a major step towards the founding of the Cubist movement[4] Cubism began between 1907 and 1911. Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braque’s 1908 Houses at L’Estaque (and related works) prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques (cubic oddities). Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebroas, as the first Cubist paintings. The first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called ‘Salle 41’; it included works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, yet no works by Picasso and Braque were exhibited.

By 1911 Picasso was recognized as the inventor of Cubism, while Braque’s importance and precedence was argued later, with respect to his treatment of space, volume and mass in the L’Estaque landscapes. But “this view of Cubism is associated with a distinctly restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be called Cubists,” wrote the art historian Christopher Green: “Marginalizing the contribution of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911” Historians have divided the history of cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch.

According to Cooper there was “Early Cubism”, (from 1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called “High Cubism”, (from 1909 to 1914) during which timeJuan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to “Late Cubism” (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement. Douglas Cooper’s restrictive use of these terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris (from 1911) and Léger (to a lesser extent) implied an intentional value judgement. ————————————————- Technical and stylistic aspects During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures.

Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso’s paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism. Paul Cézanne, Quarry Bibémus, 1898-1900,Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany The art historian Douglas Cooper states that Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne “were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism and especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907”. Cooper goes on to say: “The Demoiselles is generally referred to as the first Cubist picture. This is an exaggeration, for although it was a major first step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist.

The disruptive, expressionist element in it is even contrary to the spirit of Cubism, which looked at the world in a detached, realistic spirit. Nevertheless, the Demoiselles is the logical picture to take as the starting point for Cubism, because it marks the birth of a new pictorial idiom, because in it Picasso violently overturned established conventions and because all that followed grew out of it.” The most serious objection to regarding the Demoiselles as the origin of Cubism, with its evident influence of primitive art, is that “such deductions are unhistorical”, wrote the art historian Daniel Robbins. This familiar explanation “fails to give adequate consideration to the complexities of a flourishing art that existed just before and during the period when Picasso’s new painting developed.” Between 1905 and 1908, a conscious search for a new style caused rapid changes in art across France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Russia. The Impressionists had used a double point of view, and both Les Nabis and the Symbolists (who also admired Cézanne) flattened the picture plane, reducing their subjects to simple geometric forms.

Neo-Impressionist structure and subject matter, most notably to be seen in the works of Georges Seurat (e.g., Parade de Cirque,Le Chahut and Le Cirque), was another important influence. There were also parallels in the development of literature and social thought. In addition to Seurat, the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Cézanne’s later work: first his breaking of the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and second his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones. However, the cubists explored this concept further than Cézanne. They represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had all their faces visible at the same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way objects could be visualized in painting and art. Jean Metzinger, La Femme au Cheval, Woman with a horse, 1911-1912, Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark.

Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, and published in Apollinaire’s 1913 Les Peintres Cubistes. Provenance: Jacques Nayral, Niels Bohr I am researching … Safe Site & 100% Secure Transaction StudentSimple on Twitter Pablo Picasso's Cubism Period Biography Pablo Picasso's Cubism Period - 1909 to 1912 Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.

Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque. The technique of faceting originated from Georges Braques - it was his way to depict a natural object. Picasso didn't so much facet natural objects, but used the geometry of Braques' faceted paintings to create a style that was abstract in essence, almost pure abstract art. So cubism refers to the styles of both Braques and Picasso, although Braques' cubism has a recognizable figurative objective, while Picasso's cubism served as the link between Braques' style and pure the abstract art that followed from cubism. Noteworthy is the work of Piet Mondrian , who linearized cubism in his 1912 Apple Tree painting, a process which ultimately led to the first really non-figurative paintings (or pure abstract art), from 1914 on. An important difference between Picasso and the cubist Mondrian was that Picasso never really gave up the third dimension.

He played with dimensions, flirted with removing the third, but never became a pure abstract painter. So deeply his figurative upbringing was engrained (he was an artistic prodigy and well-rounded figurative painter at 15), that one of the main creators of abstract art never made it to this development's ultimate consequence: pure abstract art. In that sense Picasso wasn't the radical and revolutionary that, during his cubist period he appeared to become; his cubist period was followed (leaving his cubist converts bewildered) by his neo-classicism, a return to tradition. From there on his recognition and wealth grew and his role as a bringer of fundamental change in the art of painting was over. MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Georges Braque - 242 artworks - WikiArt.org Georges Braque References: A prominent figure in the development of cubism, Georges Braque was a French painter and sculptor. As a young adult, he worked during the day as a house painter and decorator, in the same line of work as his father and grandfather, and he attended evening classes at the School of Fine Arts in Le Havre, France.

In 1902, he received his certificate as a decorator, but still attended art school, at the Humbert Academy, where he studied until 1904. Braque’s early works were impressionistic, but transitioned into a fauvist style after seeing work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905. By 1907, his fauvist works were exhibited a the Salon des Independents. The development of cubism came shortly after Braque met and began working with Pablo Picasso, in 1909. Both artists produced representative paintings with a monochromatic color scheme and interlocking blocks and complex forms. The summer of 1911 was especially fruitful for the artists. They painted side by side in the French Pyrenees, producing paintings that extremely difficult to differentiate each other’s paintings. The ultimate result of their time together was the development of a new style of painting, Analytic Cubism. The two artists worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I, upon which Braque joined the French Amy and left Picasso’s side.

After his return from the war, in which he was seriously wounded in the battlefield, Braque moved away from the harsh lines and sharp pointed complexity of the cubist style, and instead began to paint pieces with bright colors and eventually return to the human figure. Although he departed from his harsh lines and forms, Braque never abandoned his cubist style. Whereas Picasso freely painted in many styles, from representational to cubist, surreal, and abstract, Braque held true to his fragmented forms and simultaneous perspective. By the time of his death in 1963, he was regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the School of Fines art in Paris, as well as in modern art.

Question: Which artistic movement was led by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso?
Answer: Cubism